Real Life
by TeamCedric
Summary: The credit for this goes to JK Rowling, who first got me thinking. Susan wishes they could all understand.


**A/N: The credit goes to JK Rowling, for making me think about this.**

"There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She's become irreligious basically because she found sex," Rowling says. "I have a big problem with that."

time/magazine/article/0,9171,1083935, #ixzz22Bdngkmr

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What they hadn't seemed to realize was how alone they made her feel. They went on and on about her clothes and her friends and her schoolwork and how different she thought she was from them, and they—including Peter, whom she'd always looked to for support long before the other two came along—had slowly and then swiftly closed her out of their conversation, simply for being her age.

Her aunt Alberta's arm was around her shoulder and Susan could see the handkerchief she held up to her face was smudged a little with lipstick as the procession went past them into the church. Aunt Alberta and Uncle Harold had lost their only son too. As much as Eustace had worried them with his attitude since he'd come back from Narnia, they had loved him and encouraged him and it had made him a much nicer child, as far as Susan could see.

She herself stood watching the coffins move past her with no expression at all. She was far too angry to cry. None of them had thought of her—not even her parents, who for reasons she'd never know had decided to wait for the others with Peter and Edmund. Susan would have liked a visit with her parents and her siblings, especially a nice tea at the station before Lucy came in, dominating the conversation like she always did. But no-one had asked her.

Susan had been out watching the rowing competition which was taking place near her bedsit on the Thames. One of the wonderful things about school was the friends she'd made there—thank God for them, now that the others had left her—and the brothers and cousins to whom she had been introduced. Thanks to the Narnia experience she had never been able to settle to regular school life again, so while many of her friends were looking into universities and careers of their own, Susan knew she would have to rely on her storied looks and athletic charms to make her living. She needed those picnics in Hyde Park, the art exhibitions at Windsor, the theatre trips where a tentative, slightly damp hand might find its way onto her lap, to see her through the gates to the rest of her life. Hockey games were fun and the more daring set were now playing with boys and girls on the same team, so there were plenty of opportunities for contact: more than her mother would have liked to see. But this was Susan's university; her degree would be awarded on a marriage certificate.

As close as she had once been to her siblings, she wished that she could say she'd felt a frisson of knowledge when the train had ploughed into the buffers and destroyed twenty feet of waiting area behind it. But she hadn't. There was only the frisson she felt when watching four strong men dressed in less than she'd ever see anywhere else, pulling a sliver-thin boat down the river with only the strength in their arms. One of them, whose name she was sure was Carstairs or Carruthers or Cadogan or something (she would really have to start keeping them straight, she was already two years into this thing and she was going to have to focus), had given her a big smile when the boats were lining up. When they'd finished the race she'd hurried down to the line to give the boy a smile of her own when he was close enough for her to see the water glistening on his skin. She had hung back while he and his team-mates did their boy things of backslapping and name-calling and shaking their heads like dogs, and finally he'd walked past her on his way to the changing rooms. She had made sure he'd seen her and knew she'd seen him, and then she'd turned and walked back to her friends and her picnic blanket.

She'd only had to wait about fifteen minutes before he was accepting congratulations from the other girls on the blanket, and looking at her for permission to sit. They began the game, where he looked to find out how modern she was (her clothes were promising, 1950s style as far as rationing allowed, but she wore no makeup during the day), and she looked to find out what his parents did and if they owned any property (he had gone to Eton and was in his final year at Oxford, but the rules had changed so much you could never be sure). At the end of the day there was an agreement that if they saw each other at the Pops the following weekend, they would say hello. Perfectly satisfied and pleasantly excited by the flutter in her stomach, Susan and her friends had gone back to their rooming house.

Lucy had even been cross with her for moving out of her parents' house. They had had to spend so long living with Professor Kirke that the rest of them seemed to feel that they should never move away from their parents again. And besides, that, they were all living as if it was still the war. They didn't seem to have read a single news story or listened to a single piece of music since 1943. When her friends asked her for intricate details of her weeks in America (Susan, being the only one of her set who had been there, was a bit of a celebrity), when she and her friends started doing whatever they could to make their skirts wider, and cut their waistbands so close that you could almost count their ribs, and wore their hair in ponytails and spent all their pocket money at the cinema watching American films full of young people and colour and dancing, Lucy, who had never met one, stubbornly insisted on making fun of Americans, conveniently forgetting how much they had done to get her out of the Professor's house, and calling Susan a clown if she so much as put lipstick on to go to a dance. Susan had asked Lu to come to the cinema with her at first, but Lucy would rather stay at home and endlessly discuss their lives in Narnia with Edmund.

Didn't any of them suffer from that period of their lives the way she did? Didn't any of them want to grow up and be adults, be in charge of themselves the way they had been in Narnia? In Narnia she had all the income she desired. She had not needed to marry. She had had control. Back in this world she was simply trying to become that person again, through the rules imposed on her by her society. She was realistic enough to accept that she was never going back to Narnia and to move on, to try and succeed in this world. The rest of them never let it go. Peter was lucky: this society was made for him and his fellows; he would end up being more like he'd been in Narnia than any of them. But he just wanted to go back and have it all, be the 'High King.' Honestly. It _was_ all a game.

It had also added twenty years to their lives that Susan wasn't at all sure she wanted. Sometimes she was just so _tired_, thinking about those extra years no-one else would ever understand. The choosing and gaining of a husband was also a chance for her to _rest_.

"The Friends of Narnia" they would call themselves when they thought she couldn't hear. Narnia didn't need them, didn't they see? They had been told they wouldn't go back and they hadn't; Eustace and Jill had taken their places. And just because she pointed this out to them, she was shut out. Her parents took Lucy and Edmund's side and told her to humour their "funny games." It wasn't funny at all to Susan. What was Lucy going to do when she'd finished university and still lived as though she were in a different world?

Susan's landlady had taken the call: she complained every time the 'phone rang, assuming it was another boy calling a girl who was too "fast." They would get warnings if they received too many calls. When Susan was called downstairs to the hall where the telephone stood she thought the Carruthers boy had found her phone number. So the actual words spoken by the journalist on the other end of the line—beating out the policeman who came to her door five minutes later—had so much unreality to them that she was still trying to make her way back to the real world, two weeks later. It was just like when she'd come back from Narnia, when they'd asked each other for weeks afterward, "Did that really happen?"

She had met with a lawyer who told her Professor Kirke's will had left her everything he owned (left it to all the Pevensie children, naturally, in the event of Aunt Polly's death), but what he owned these days fit into a little cottage on the south coast, hundreds of miles away from Susan's life. Her parents, of course, had left her all they had, which was a small amount of money and a large amount of class pride and expectation. But while deep inside she was acknowledging this information, externally she could not get past the fact that because of their selfishness they had all left her, all at once, as if to punish her in the most brutal way possible, just for being real.


End file.
